


Rehab

by Yossk



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 00:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14093481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yossk/pseuds/Yossk
Summary: Her heart pounds. It’s a living, breathing, thing attempting to escape from her chest, leaping against her rib cage and diving up her throat. One foot. Then the other. Door handle. The world is blurring but it’s hard and cool beneath her fingers, something solid to cling onto.Rehab's a bitch.





	Rehab

**Author's Note:**

> I'm currently watching my way through Agent's of SHIELD, and have discovered that Bobbi Morse is all kinds of awesome. So this happened. 
> 
> Please be mindful of that fact that I'm currently only up to S03 E12 _The Inside Man_ , so no spoilers in the comments please!

Her heart pounds. It’s a living, breathing, _thing_ attempting to escape from her chest, leaping against her rib cage and diving up her throat. One foot. Then the other. Door handle. The world is blurring but it’s hard and cool beneath her fingers, something solid to cling onto.

And then: 

“Bobbi? What are you doing? Get back into bed.”

“Bathroom.” The voice isn’t hers, it’s a gasp, a desperate, hoarse snatch for air. She tries to breathe deeply, tries to lower her diaphragm, expand her lungs, but pain shoots down her left side and there just isn’t enough oxygen. 

There’s a hand on her back and it’s gentle but it feels like fire, and her vision is clouding in and suddenly she’s back where she started, cool sheets rough against her skin.

“Wait here. I’ll get someone.”

“Where else am I going to wait?” It comes out a croak, voice cracked not just from lack of use.

Hunter squeezes her hand before he leaves, striding out the door and breathing normally.

…

_One, two._

Two steps, and then rest, clinging onto the bannister, the wood cool and hard against a shaking hand. And then two more.

_Two steps._

She can run marathons ( _she can_ ). Her old body could. This one aches, pain shooting down her right shin, up her thigh with each impact on the ground feeling like her bones might shatter apart.

Five cycles, and she stops on the landing, gasping, her heart pounding a tattoo, beating frantically against a great weight sitting on her chest. It feels alien, something new and different which doesn’t belong.

There’s as far ahead as there is behind. Bobbi looks up, watches as the flight ahead of her splits and waivers and coalesces again. 

There’s nothing at the top but the way back down.

Still, she climbs on.

…

In her dreams, her knee cracks and her vision whites out, and through the pain and the adrenaline and the endorphins, she doesn’t care all that much. _It doesn’t matter_ , she thinks, _I have another leg._

And when the bullet pierces her back and her lung starts filling with blood she doesn’t feel anything much at all. _Hunter’s alive_ , she thinks, as the world turns black, _I have another lung._

The human body is amazing, really, the way it keeps you going when you have to, the way it stops you from thinking.

But it doesn’t last forever. Reality always hits eventually.

…

Four weeks _after,_ somewhere in the hazy mist between surgeries two and three, when showers are still off-limits but she can brush her fucking teeth alone in the bathroom. The floor is damp from Daisy’s shower, lubricated with soap. A cracked tile catches Bobbi’s heel and she slips, her right leg sliding out from under her. She hits the ground hard.

( _For a fleeting instant, as her knee screams and her eyes screw shut, she sees Ward above her. But he’s gone in an instant because she_ will not let him)

She doesn’t cry out, not right away. The room is warm and still steamy, and she grips her toothbrush in her hand, hard and cool. She’s waiting for something, for it to be easy. It doesn’t come. 

Hunter opens the door because he heard the thump and he tried to wait her out, to give her the space but he couldn’t wait any longer.

She wonders, as he helps her up, why he’s shivering when he feels so warm.

…

Coulson comes to see her, sits next to her bed amidst the beeping monitors. He talks about patience and healing and perhaps she can help Fitz in the lab until she’s ready to get back in the field. 

There’s an elephant in the room. The absence of a cheerful English bio-chemist gnaws at the edges of their conversation, treads on things unsaid.  
It all feels a bit presumptuous when she can barely walk to the bathroom by herself. 

He rests his prosthetic arm on the bed, makes a spasming gesture towards it with his other hand. “It’ll take time to get used to how things have changed.”

She waits until he’s left before she thinks it. It seems selfish, really. 

_But you chose to risk your life. And you got away with only an arm._

It’s not that she hasn’t risked hers, willingly, over and over again. But this time… this time was different. 

_I was a fool_ , she thinks, _to be duped like that._

And, sometimes:

_I should have fought harder._

…

Sleep is fitful, when it comes at all. Bobbi starts awake at the slightest sound. Footsteps in the corridor, a rattle in the pipes as the shower starts up, the _thwack_ of Daisy's fist on a punching bag in the gym below. It all shatters through her brain like a foghorn, dragging her back into consciousness.

Most of the time, she’s grateful.

When she dreams, when she doesn’t see Hunter lying dead on the floor, when she doesn’t see Ward laughing and winning, she sees Kara. She sees Hydra come to drag her away.

Sometimes, she wishes she’d had another choice.

…

In her own bedroom, sitting on her own bed for the first time since.

Hunter drops down beside her, a soft thump and a depression in the mattress. The warmth on her left side makes her right feel cold. 

“Do you want me to stay?”

“I—“ She thinks she does but she doesn’t want to ask. 

He takes her hand, idly running his thumb along the back of her wrist. “Never mind. We’ll decide later.”

The thumb is rough but the touch gentle, back and forth over her skin. She tries to focus on it, to feel it, but there’s another sensation crowding her brain, something else pressing against her wrist. She stiffens. Hunter looks up.

Her face is in profile, shadows crossing her face and darkening her eyes.

“Shit, Bob. Sorry.” He drops her hand.

She shakes her head, blinking, gritting her teeth. 

“Why is this different?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been injured before. I’ve been…“ She pauses, struggling to put the words to it, “...interrogated before. Why do I feel different?”

Hunter contemplates. It’s different for him, too. 

“This was personal.” And then he continues, enunciating each word clearly, like a promise to the universe, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Not if I get there first.”

…

The treadmill whirs around at a snail’s pace. One foot forward, and then another. Endlessly onwards.

Bobbi can feel the sweat forming on her brow, feel her heartrate speeding up and her lungs struggling for breath. Her knee is starting to click, it feels like something’s grinding. 

Her fist bounces as she hits the stop button.

Half a mile, in half an hour. 

It’s a start, but it feels like the end.

…

The lab is crowded, and she skirts around the edges. Jemma is everywhere, in everything and Bobbi carves out her own space carefully. 

Test tubes and titrations and mass spectrometers. It’s like stepping back in time, winding back the years and trying to be the person she used to be.

She doesn’t fit here, anymore. The white lab coat sits uncomfortably on her shoulders. It stands out, it doesn’t hide the dirt ( _or the blood._ )

Fitz’s patience is thin, his nerves frayed. They could be friends and, maybe, they will be friends. But he doesn’t have the space for it yet. Jemma fills it all.

…

She dreams less frequently, but more vividly. Rough ropes around her wrists and Ward laughing as she struggles. He drags her down the corridor, concrete scraping her back and one leg scrambling for purchase. Her blood on the doorframe.

Later, he holds her knee between his hands. He looks at her and he smiles before he squeezes and twists. She whimpers and, eventually, screams. Kara shoves a gag in her open mouth.

Bobbi feels her eyes glaze over, feel herself retreat far back into her mind. She feels helpless and hopeless.

She feels humiliated most of all.

…

They find a pattern, eventually, a way to carry on. Bobbi finds her own space, fills her desk with piles of notes and stray petri dishes, a comfortable chaos to balance the sterility. She finds she has an unexpected affinity for forensics, finds a strange satisfaction in blood and hair and dirt, in pulling it apart on a microscopic scale and discovering its secrets.

She watches them leave on field missions. Daisy and Mack and Hunter and Coulson. Runs back-up from the van, collects samples, sends data. It’s interesting and satisfying and it sparks a part of her brain that has lain dormant for so many years. But it’s not who she is anymore, not who she wants to be.

But she thinks about joining them, thinks about walking out to the quinjet with May. Thinks about a mission gone not so much sideways as flipped upside down and shoved through a wormhole. And she doesn’t know what she wants any more.

So she wanders the corridors as she waits for their return, mindlessly twirling her batons and making Fitz twitchy, when he’s there to see it. 

She doesn’t know who she wants to be.

…

Inhumans start appearing with a startling frequency, and it soon becomes clear that throwing a caseload of Terragen crystals into the ocean wasn’t such a smart idea. They can’t blame Daisy, not really. No-one, except maybe Jemma, would have realised in that moment of adrenaline and grief and terror what that could mean. 

And so they trace it through the food chain, from trawlers to fishmongers to health food shops. Always one step behind, always arriving an hour or a minute or a week too late.

She analyses the fish oils when they bring them in, prepares a sample for the mass spectrometer. As she watches it spin and waits for the results, she looks at the rest of the bottle. Little golden pills of liquid that might have the power to transform a life.

She’s tempted, so tempted. _Terragenesis._ It’s a small chance, but it could repair her, could knit her knee back together, grow her lung back to full size.

But she doesn’t. She’s been transformed once already. She’s not sure she could do it again.

…

The treadmill whirs and her feet pound. Five miles, this time, until she starts gasping and her breath is hitching and she knows she has to stop, or pass out. It’s no longer than yesterday, or the day before, or last week. Her fist bounces. She should cool down, walk for five minutes, let her heartrate calm and her breathing even out. But she’s too frustrated. Nothing’s moving.

The door opens suddenly as she steps off, “The analysis is finished.” Fitz’s voice is excited, a tirade of thought spilling out as he gesticulates with his hands, “It nearly matches, but there’s this… this… inconsistency in the DNA. It might be…” He stops suddenly as he sees her, hands shaking and sweaty and struggling for breath, “Oh, sorry, are you ok?” His eyebrows have creased in concern.

Bobbi nods, “Yeah.” She gets out between breaths, “Just getting nowhere fast.” She laughs a little as she leans on the back of a chair. In and out, slowly, chest never quite expanding far enough.

Fitz swipes at something on his tablet, and sets it down on the table, “It… will take a while.”

“I know. I’ll get better. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

“No. That’s…They don’t know what they’re talking about.” He looks her in the eye and she realises that he rarely does that. They talk all the time, one of them staring at a screen, or focussing on a titration or fiddling with a soldering iron. Rarely like this, face to face. “The hardest part is accepting that you’ve changed. That… you can’t go back.”

She remembers then, what she’s been told, what happened to him and Jemma when the world fell apart and SHIELD imploded. He knows the white rage coursing through her veins at what’s been done to her. The way she hates herself for _letting_ him do this to her.

“I’m going to kill him.”

“I’m sure you’ll have better luck than I did. But you still won’t… be able to go back.”

“I know. I’m still going to do it.”

Fitz nods, as if he think she’ll change her mind, eventually. She knows she won’t.

…

Bobbi watches Hunter leave and she wants to hurl things and rage at the world. She doesn’t want to be left behind.

“Don’t die out there.” She calls after him.

_Don’t kill him before I get there._

  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A reiteration of the fact that I love comments, but please don't tell me what happens beyond the middle of series 3!


End file.
